ONE of the
saddest consequences of the economic crisis ravaging Greece is that suicide has
risen steadily in a country where the number of people taking their own life
used to be comparatively low. The official statistics are bad enough, but they
almost certainly under-state the phenomenon.
In
2011 it was recorded that 393 Greek men and 84 women had taken their own lives;
that was up from 336 men and 41 women in 2010. Klimaka, a Greek NGO which drew
attention to these figures, reckons that serious suicide attempts (regardless
of the outcome) are 15-20 times more frequent than recorded suicides.
Every so often a dramatic act of despair catches the country's imagination. In spring last year a 77-year-old retired pharmacist shot himself in the head in the central square of Athens, leaving a note saying that he could not bear the idea of "scavenging in dustbins for food and becoming a burden to my child… "And anybody who knows Greece well can probably think of at least one acquaintance whose death was prompted, entirely or in part, by financial desperation.
One reason why official suicide rates are
misleadingly low is the social, and spiritual, stigma attached to the act. As
with most Christian denominations, suicide is condemned by the Orthodox Church,
to which most Greeks, with widely varying levels of conviction, formally
belong. By its own rules, the church should refuse the usual burial rites to a
person who has taken his own life, although the rules may be relaxed if it can
be shown the balance of the mind was disturbed.
For all these reasons, a pronouncement by
the Archbishop of Athens on the subject of suicide commands attention.
Archbishop Hieronymus, a more sympathetic and less verbose figure than some of
his recent predecessors, addressed [in Greek] the issue in a newspaper column
yesterday, using a tone that was pretty humane, as church statements on the
matter go. Suicide, he wrote in Kathimerini, could be undertaken for many reasons,
none of them ultimately well-founded: ranging from simple despair to a desire
to punish our nearest and dearest, or even to regain the love of people who see
us as a failure. It sometimes reflected a person's loss of a relationship with
God or a desire to punish God.
"I won't go on any longer, so as to not to give the wrong impression that I judge harshly the people who resort to the act in question. Our respect for their memory and the love we feel for them as unique human persons must remain undiminished," he added. (Those are not easy words for an Orthodox bishop to say; they recall some of the more humane recent pronouncements of Pope Francis.) But the archbishop urged the media not to glamorize acts of suicidal protest.
As you'd expect from a Christian hierarch,
he rejected the secular-humanist view of suicide as a valid personal choice, a
view summed up by the title of a popular British play: "Whose life is it
anyway?" As he put it: "The universal
principles of personal freedom and self-determination cannot be called into
question… but they do have limits. They cannot remain unlimited when, applied
in a certain way, they cause so much pain." While insisting that suicide
was the wrong way to utter a cry of despair, the archbishop urged all those
affected or bereaved by the act to reflect on their own failure to offer succor
in time.
When Greek clergy have hit the headlines in
recent times, it has often been for lamentable reasons: because they are
fighting inter-church turf wars or embroiled in financial scandals. To his
credit, Archbishop Hieronymus has largely avoided those traps, and he has
spoken out against the anti-immigrant racism, some of it using quasi-religious
rhetoric, which has raised its head in Greece. And whether people fully agree
with it or not, this latest intervention will also be received with respect.
(Πηγή: economist.com)
